Chapter Two
Caroline’s heart had gone to her knees at the exact moment she’d said Jack’s name. Mercy, what had she done?
She wanted to take back the last handful of seconds, wanted to fix her expression so that Jack wouldn’t see right through her. But she couldn’t. The lid was off Pandora’s box, and it wasn’t going back on. And if that wasn’t bad enough, now she had that face on the security video to worry about.
Caroline swallowed hard and looked at Lucille, who immediately took hold of her arm.
“You need to sit down,” Lucille instructed.
“You look like you’re about to pass out.
” She tried to lead Caroline back into the living room, but she held her ground.
“Did your memory really come back?” Lucille asked.
“Yes,” Caroline managed to say.
Lucille let out a huge breath of relief. Of course, the nurse didn’t know how dangerous the man she’d recognized was. She also didn’t know something Jack had already figured out.
That she’d regained her memory days ago.
As if celebrating and relieved by the progress, Lucille hugged her. “I’ll need to call your doctor. Maybe we can drive out to see him?”
Even though Caroline liked her doctors and she’d had no trouble on the previous trips to San Antonio for her exams, she definitely didn’t want a doctor right now.
“No. Could you give me a moment alone with Marshal Slater?” Caroline asked. It probably seemed petty or insulting to Jack that she’d call him by his surname now, but saying Jack seemed too, well, intimate.
Considering all the other intimate things they’d done, it would be so easy to slip back into that. After all, she had only told one man that she loved him, and it was the same man who was now glaring at her.
Lucille continued to give her a long, concerned look. “Should I get your meds?”
“No,” Caroline repeated. “I’m not going to have a panic attack.” She thought that was true, anyway, and even if it wasn’t, she couldn’t deal with the haze that the meds created in her mind. “I just need a moment with Marshal Slater. It’s...personal.”
“Oh.” Lucille seemed relieved, which meant that maybe she knew or had guessed that Jack and Caroline had once been involved.
Jack knew it too, of course. There was nothing wrong with his memory. Or his glare. He stood there, all lanky and lean, looking more cop than cowboy now—though he was both. He’d come from a long line of Texas cowboys, and it fit him as well as his jeans and his ice-blue shirt.
No ice in his eyes, though. There was so much fire and heat in the depths of all that gray.
The color of a dangerous storm cloud ready to shoot some lightning bolts her way.
His hair was even darker than that. Midnight black.
And right now his clothes, his expression and everything else about him made him seem more than a little dangerous.
Caroline waited until Lucille was out of the room before she said anything else. She turned to Jack, and she answered his question before he could even ask it. “Three days ago. That’s when I regained my memory.”
Muscles stirred in his jaw, and she doubted his eyes could narrow even more. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” he asked through clenched teeth.
Oh, he was so not going to like this, and worse, she wasn’t going to have time to smooth it over. No time to try to make him understand. “I don’t know who killed your father. That’s the truth.”
“And I’m just to believe that after you’ve lied to me for three days, or longer?” Jack snarled.
Good point, and Caroline conceded that with a weary sound of agreement. It hadn’t been longer, but she doubted she could convince him of that.
“The night Eric Lang kidnapped me, he did injure me,” Caroline continued.
“He bashed me on the head with his gun.” She idly rubbed the scar on her forehead that she’d gotten from that attack.
“And when that wasn’t enough to render me unconscious, he pumped me full of drugs.
Then he hid me and Gemma in one of the rooms of the abandoned hotel, Serenity Inn. ”
No need for her to get into too many specifics on the location.
Jack had almost certainly searched every inch of that old hotel and gone over all the details of the investigation that followed.
He knew that Eric had indeed managed to escape with her, and Jack had likely found her blood or some other evidence in that crumbling, smothering room that had once been part of a Victorian mansion.
“Eric didn’t kill your father,” she went on.
“Eric was with me, holding a gun to my bleeding head when I heard the shots. And yes, I know it was the shots that killed your dad, because I also heard Gemma scream. I could hear the chaos that followed.” She had to pause and gather her breath.
With her breath, though, came the images.
Mercy, the images.
Caroline had to try to rein all of that in. If she had a panic attack, Lucille would force her into taking those meds, and that couldn’t happen. She needed to finish what she had to say.
“Eric got away with me,” Caroline went on several moments later while Jack stood there and drilled holes in her with his intense stare.
“By then, I was barely conscious, but he talked to someone on the phone. A cop or some kind of lawman. And that person helped him escape. I know the caller was in law enforcement because there was a police radio in the background.”
She didn’t expect Jack to buy that, and even if he did, it still wouldn’t justify her withholding the information that she’d regained her memory or the fact that she hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him.
“Before I got my memory fully back, before I remembered us, I thought the person talking to Eric that night was you,” she said.
That didn’t come out right, so she shook her head.
“Or rather, someone you knew, because the other words I heard were ‘Longview Ridge Sheriff’s Office.’ I heard dispatch codes.
I thought it could be someone you wouldn’t believe would help a serial killer, and that your disbelief would allow him to get to me or someone else. ”
Now he cursed, and those jaw muscles went to war with each other. “I’m not dirty, and I don’t know any marshal or cop who is. I sure as hell wouldn’t have helped Eric.”
“Maybe not. But someone with a badge did. And I decided that if I wanted to stay alive, I couldn’t trust you, the other marshals or anyone in your family.”
He opened his mouth as if to blast her with verbal fire, but then he stopped, and it looked as if he’d done some reining in of his emotions, as well. “Yet you let me put you here. You let me come here to visit you.”
She lifted her shoulder, tapped her head.
“I didn’t know, not when I came here. Three days ago, when the memories came, I decided I was safe as long as you and everyone connected to you thought I wasn’t a threat.
Or as long as you believed that I could eventually tell you who killed your father.
” Caroline took his phone. “But he’s a threat. I don’t have to guess about that.”
Jack’s glare got even worse, and she could tell the last thing he wanted to do was switch subjects. But he was also a lawman, and he’d seen the way she’d reacted to the man. Of course, maybe he thought she had faked that fear, too.
She hadn’t.
“His name is Kingston Morris,” she continued when Jack didn’t say anything else. “And he was friends with Eric. The fact that he’s here means he knows where I am and that he could have come here to kill me. Maybe to tidy up loose ends for his old friend.”
“Kingston Morris,” he repeated, not just once but several times as if testing to see if it rang any bells. “His name didn’t come up in the investigation.”
“It wouldn’t have. I only remember Kingston coming in one time to the office where Eric and I worked.”
“The office at the college.” There was plenty of skepticism in his voice. “And yet you remembered him after just one meeting.”
She shrugged. “He gave me the creeps.”
That was an understatement. The guy had made her skin crawl, and because Kingston had seemed to worship Eric, that was the first time Caroline had started to look at Eric in a different light.
That was the beginning of her seeing the monster crouched just below the facade he put on as a research assistant.
Too bad she hadn’t seen it a whole lot sooner.
If she had, Jack’s dad might be alive. Many others, too.
“If Eric and he were friends, Kingston’s name should have come up,” Jack concluded.
“Eric had erased all of his contacts. Or rather, he only left contacts and info that he didn’t mind being discovered. He just used burner phones for getting in touch with anyone who was important to him.”
“And this Kingston was important?” Jack asked while he typed something on his phone. She then heard the swooshes of outgoing texts. Maybe he was reaching out to his marshal friends to do a quick background check on Kingston. She hoped he hadn’t mentioned that she’d regained her memory.
She nodded in reply to his question. “After Eric managed to get me away from the abandoned inn, it was Kingston who helped Eric get some money. I heard their phone conversation, too, and Kingston was like a groupie. He idolized Eric, would do anything for him.”
This time Jack said a single word of profanity. “And you didn’t think you should give this info to someone?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “Even if you didn’t trust me, you could have told the cops.”
“I didn’t know if I could trust them, either.” She had to pause again. “And I really did have amnesia until three days ago.”
He made a sound that conveyed a whole boatload of doubt.